A man and his time: Cronkite was role model for medium

Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle |
July 21, 2009

Rarely has the birth of a medium matched the unique skills of an individual as well as early television news fit the talents and temperament of Walter Cronkite. Their union created an American news giant of unmatched influence over the daily discourse of the nation.

Neither glib nor good looking in the style of later occupants of anchor desks at the major networks, in his 19 years at the helm of the CBS Evening News Cronkite became the face, the voice and the conscience that schooled Americans on the events of their time.

Whether by conveying his undisguised joy at watching U.S. astronauts land on the moon, or anguish as he informed millions of viewers that President John F. Kennedy was dead in Dallas, he took on an authority usually reserved for national leaders.

The Missouri-born Cronkite, who died at 92 from cerebrovascular complications at his Manhattan home last Friday, traveled far from his roots during a spectacular career. He spent most of his formative years in Houston, attending Lanier Junior High and San Jacinto High School, before moving on to a stint at the University of Texas. His early grounding in journalism came by way of a summer job at the Houston Post and a position at the afternoon daily Houston Press.

By the time he became a frontline correspondent in World War II, Cronkite was already a print and radio journalism veteran.

It was after the war that he had his date with destiny, stepping into the raw, nascent world of television news. Another journalism legend, Edward R. Murrow, recruited Cronkite to work at CBS television news in 1950. He became the network's evening anchor and managing editor in 1962, just in time for a decade of racial and political upheaval, including the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the disastrous American involvement in Vietnam.

At times Cronkite stepped beyond the role of reporter, to deliver judgments that profoundly influenced public opinion. Reporting from South Vietnam, he pronounced the war unwinnable, prompting President Lyndon Johnson to exclaim, famously, “If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America.”

As the brave new world of electronic journalism fragments into ideologically tinted cable programs and internet blogs of all description, it's unlikely that Cronkite's singular role in interpreting the American zeitgeist will ever be repeated. He was truly one of a kind.